Download iBat http://http://raynersoftware.com/ibatt/ and check the capacity of your battery ("Statistics"). Compare it with the specs of your battery. May be your battery has already lost a lot of it's capacity?

kernel DRM - provides direct access to the hardware through drm.ko and radeon.ko

radeon driver for Xorg - graphics driver, radeon_drv.o

R300 DRI driver for Xorg - 3d rendering, r300_dri.so

OpenGL libraries - libGL.so

I've got 3D acceleration enabled using:

uninorth-agp with kernel 2.6.13-rc3

kernel DRM from vanilla-sources-2.6.13-rc3 (drm.ko & radeon.ko)

Radeon driver from Xorg 6.8.99.14 (radeon_drv)

DRI driver from these drivers (r300_dri)

libGL from Mesa CVS

Currently:

the kernel loads and initializes AGP transfers and DRM

Xorg loads and initializes DRI

glxinfo reports that direct rendering is enabled.

However:

font display is corrupted

glxgears doesn't render

The first problem, I suspect, is caused by using kernel 2.6.13-rc3 with the kernel DRM drivers rather than a 2.6.9 kernel with the DRM drivers provided by r300.sf.net (as the r300 README recommends).

The second problem is probably caused by my having (stupidly) built Mesa libGL against the r300 DRM drivers rather than the 2.6.13-rc3 DRM drivers that I'm using.

There have been a couple of reports on dri-devel (from as far back as January) of the drivers working on Radeon 9600 M10 on PPC.
The current drivers are reportedly able to run Quake 3 without visible glitches on x86...

So next, I'll try rebuilding libGL against 2.6.13 DRM and see if that fixes glxgears rendering.
Then a 2.6.9 kernel (as recommended in the R300 drivers) and see if I actually get something more usable.

Thanks for your answer (as you can see, I do not visit here so often: had to work a lot in the 6 last months). Btw, the release of the Macbook pro is just about the good time for me to get my two years old alu book functional...

*** Direct rendering support is highly experimental for Radeon 9500
*** and newer cards. The 3d mesa driver is not provided in this tree.
*** A very experimental (and incomplete) version is available from Mesa CVS.
*** Additional information can be found on http://r300.sourceforge.net
*** This message has been last modified on 2005-08-07.